Category Archives: Careers & Enterprise

Year 12 have just completed their week’s work experience in industry. Work experience placements serve multiple purposes, including experience of the world of work, employability skill development and experience to help guide future career decision-making.

Some of the companies who hosted Y12 were HSBC Bank, 5Plus Architects, NHS, Unilever and Key 103. We have received some excellent employer feedback commenting on their punctuality, reliability and keenness to learn more about the company. The students faced new challenges and learnt things about themselves that they didn’t know before.

On Weds, 4th July we invited volunteers into school to conduct practice interviews with our Year 10 students as part of their Careers Day.

The day started off with an inspirational talk from one of our Alumnae and AGGS maths teacher, Sarah Chancellor. Mrs Chancellor had an exciting and rewarding career in sports event management, including working as part of the London Olympics 2012 team. Her speech, reflecting on her journey to date, was inspirational and appreciated by all. This was followed by a CV writing skills session, a team building session with the RAF and a workshop delivered by our Connexions Adviser on labour market information.

Throughout the day, Year 10 were having practice interviews with volunteers from IBM, Tesco, BBC, Together Money, Chubb and Aldi. We are extremely grateful to them for kindly giving up their busy working day to interview our students. The interviews were an introduction to ‘real life’ interviews which gave the students an insight into the world of work. We received many comments from the interviewers complementing our students on their confidence, high standard and quality of responses to questions. Well done, Year 10, on a successful day.

At the end of June all of Year 10 took part in an enterprise day run by Young Enterprise. The programme inspires students and provides information on career options to help make informed choices. Students set goals and plan their next steps to prepare them for life beyond education.

Through hands-on fun, practical activities, Learn to Earn explores themes such as career choices, personal skills and talents, recruitment and job interviews, salaries, earnings, tax and the costs of living, financial planning and budgeting.

The 2018 Ryman National Enterprise Challenge final was held at The International Centre, Telford on Wednesday 4th July. The event saw the winning teams from over 150 schools come together to compete against each other. High street retailer and stationery giant, Ryman set students the task of creating a new stationary product for the Back to School campaign. The students had to convince the panel that their product would increase revenue and brand awareness. Ready to Rule from 9-5 consisted of Ella, Milly, Mimi, Rose, Mboje, Florrie who represented the school and did themselves and the school proud. The pitch was word perfect and Ella and Mimi performed a fabulous rap as part of their advertising campaign.

The students had a good day as the event was hosted by Diversity dance group – Jordan and Perry. Theo Paphitis headed up the judging panel and hosted a Q&A with the students – “Be inspired by everything around you, use everything as inspiration”.

Well done to Ella, Milly, Mimi, Rose, Mboje, Florrie – we have definitely got some budding entrepreneurs within the school.

On Thursday, 3rd May we held our second World of Work (WoW) Day for our Year 8 students. We invited in 10 of our alumnae to deliver a series of talks on what they have done since leaving AGGS.

The aim of the day was to open the students up to an array of different careers and opportunities on offer after they leave school and to think about the different skills needed. Assemblies and form time sessions were delivered over the week to help them to think about what skills they already have, and how they can develop and build upon these skills in and out of school for their future careers.

“We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist . . . using technologies that haven’t been invented . . . in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”

Thank you to all of our alumnae volunteers for giving up their time to help us with this day. It is always lovely to welcome back our former students; current AGGS students thoroughly enjoyed hearing from those who were once in their shoes.

Year 7 took part in an enterprise challenge masterclass, where in teams of businesses, they had to buy beads in order to make bracelets and necklaces to sell at a profit. They learnt about what makes a successful business, and how each individual brings a set of personal values and skills which are equally relevant and useful. Using their skills on financial capability, decision making & evaluating decisions and budgeting – all qualities of an entrepreneur; the winning team in the morning from 7-1, Emilia, Rhianon, Sanya, Natasha and Tamara made a profit of £650 and the afternoon team from 7-4 who were Ruby, Sophie, Keshni, Mia, Bette and Anna made over £1200 profit! Well done to all who took part.

Last week Willmott Dixon ran an Enterprise day for the whole of Year 8. “The Willmott Dixon enterprise day is designed to encourage employability skills, whilst highlighting curriculum links to the construction industry” this day definitely delivered that! The long term goal of the enterprise day is to help raise awareness of careers in construction for female students, ahead of their college course/education selection; again it delivered on this as a lot of the students commented that they have a better understanding of careers available within the construction industry.

During the morning the groups completed 3 team building tasks and were awarded points not only for the result but also how well they communicated together and worked as a team. The points were then totalled and this was then used to work out their budget for the build of a new school.

Each group had to calculate how many classrooms they needed; receptions, staff rooms, sports facilities; swimming pool etc. They then used the costing sheets to calculate how much their school would cost. It was a very fraught day especially when disaster struck mid- morning and due to budget cuts they had to reduce costs by 30%!

Each of the groups had to present their ideas to a panel of judges and an overall winner was chosen. The winning group were from 8-3 and consisted of Amalie, Grace, Shreya, Isobel and Niya. Their prize was an Amazon voucher each and they will have the opportunity to visit a site which Willmott Dixon are currently building.

We look forward to working with Willmott Dixon again as it was a fantastic day and all of the students enjoyed it. More importantly they not only built on their enterprise skills but also learnt about possible careers for women in construction.

On Wednesday 21st March all of Y10 visited the Skills NW event at Event City. It was the region’s biggest careers, jobs, skills, HE and apprenticeships event to discover what their future holds. It was an opportunity for students to explore a range of careers options, talk to employer’s, find out about college courses, meet apprentices, universities and get hands-on with activities and challenges.